There has been known an application that utilizes positional information about a terminal device, which is received by a global positioning system (GPS) receiver or the like, to determine whether the user of the terminal device has entered one or more predetermined areas (service providing areas) or has left the service providing areas. For example, when the user has entered the certain service providing area, such application offers a service corresponding to the service providing area.
An operating system (OS) having a geo-fence function has been also known. The geo-fence function enables the OS to determine whether the user has entered an area set as a monitoring target (this area is referred to as “geofence”) or has left the area. Related arts are disclosed in, for example, Japanese National Publication of International Patent Application Nos. 2016-528564, 2014-520341, and 2016-521946.
An application may set the service providing area as the monitoring target to the OS. Thereby, for example, the application may receive a notification that the user has entered the service providing area from the OS, and offers a service corresponding to the service providing area.
However, in the geo-fence function, the maximum number of the areas that may be set as the monitoring targets is predefined for each OS. For this reason, the application may not set the service providing areas exceeding the maximum number of service providing areas to the OS. For example, if the maximum number of areas that may be set as the monitoring targets is “20”, the application may not set the 21 service providing areas or more to the OS.
Thus, if the service providing areas exceeding the maximum number of service providing areas that may be set to the OS are present, the application may not set all of the service providing areas as the monitoring targets to the OS. In this case, even if the user has entered the service providing area that is not set to the OS, the user may not receive the service corresponding to the service providing area concerned. Therefore, to offer the service providing area concerned, the application is required to change the areas set to the OS as the monitoring targets. In consideration of such circumstances, in using the geo-fence function on the side of the OS, it is desirable to be capable of controlling a timing at which the areas set to the OS as the monitoring targets are changed.